a long time ago, Dave brought to my attention the handy fact that anyone who uses the words “used to” to describe an activity is rarely actually engaged in that activity anymore, only hanging onto it. a piece of identity.

i cringe a bit when i say “i used to.” when i take something up, i take it UP. i internalize it, wrap myself around it. this explains how i have managed to carry the same bright, fervid torch for David Bowie lo these many years: it’s my hobby. it’s a fundamental part of how i understand myself.

of course, i can’t just go altering how i understand myself willy-nilly, all the time. Dave starts three new things every week. i like to try a new activity every decade or so. i am part Ent, i suspect. i am not given to hastiness.

but i am given to wanderlust. or i was.

(at the end of The Lord of the Rings saga, the hobbit Frodo returns home to The Shire from his adventures as the bearer of the ring, but he cannot stay. he is too changed, and he leaves Middle Earth with Gandalf and the Elves to sail on to the Undying Lands. Frodo’s faithful Sam, the gardener, unwounded by the elven blade and the ring itself, settles down in The Shire and raises babies with his cute hobbit wife. this is ripe with metaphor, people.)

i had the wanderlust from the time i was a teenager, though it was probably mostly a contagious case of the Anywhere But Heres. i used to map travel, splayed out on the living room carpet with a highlighter and a fold-out map from a hand-me-down copy of National Geographic, imagining the places i’d go.

i was nearly thirty before i got to indulge it.

i’d nibbled at it earlier. i took the train across Canada the autumn i was twenty-two: spent my last $300 on the ticket, slept in the smoking car for a week, watched the stars over the Rocky Mountains, and got a job telemarketing in Vancouver the day we arrived. but passports and flights outside the country were beyond my reach, then. i spent a year in Vancouver, two teaching in the Arctic, headed back east to Halifax and a graduate degree. until friends blazed paths to expat teaching and it occurred to me that Scotland and Prague could be considered “on the way” to Korea if one was particularly creative with one’s geography and flight routes.

i left in the fall of 2000. i came home in January of 2005.

some wiser people used that period in their lives to, um, start careers. i plan to go live with them when i am old. i will tell stories from my lost years of indigence in return for small plates of catfood.

je ne regrette rien.

i don’t travel anymore, the way i used to. sure, we went to California for the first time this summer, and i’ll be all gussied up to speak at Blissdom Canada in The Big Smoke of Toronto come October, but conference travel is by its very nature bounded. it has a goal and a set destination. it is purposeful, and social, and for me, a lot of fun. but it is no more like the open-ended wandering that marked my late twenties and early thirties than babysitting is like having a colicky kid of your very own at three a.m., four months in a row.

this past year, i had the incredible privilege of revisiting one of my stories from those wanderlust days as part of a book: my work was included in Best Women’s Travel Writing 2011, a charming anthology being thrown lots of cool launch parties i can’t attend in glamourous far-away cities. sniff.

(yes, you should buy this for everyone on your Christmas list. absolutely. think of it as investing in the catfood stockpile.)

as the book makes the review rounds, those of us published in it were asked to answer a few questions about travel, and our relationships with travel. as i picked the questions that spoke to me, and tried to answer, a Mack truck of longing ran straight over me. the wanderlust flooded.

it told me i could not LIVE my settled life and needed to hightail it for the Undying Lands at first notice.

unfortunately, as you may have suspected, this is not Middle Earth. there are no Undying Lands for the weary soul momentarily overwhelmed by the drudgery and familiarity of The Shire. well, boo.

still. i think i can live out my Sam Gamgee days in peace.

truth is, travel, for me, was a constant cacophony: new smells, new sounds, new ways of seeing. history everywhere, if you look. i loved that about it. and i didn’t.

i didn’t handle it very well sometimes. i don’t like fish, which pops up in the most unexpected – and supposedly vegetarian – places, especially in Asia. i didn’t always like being an outsider. i don’t like being dealt with in an authoritarian manner. Dave still brings up that time i shouted at the customs officer as evidence of poor judgement on my part. what did you expect me to do? i counter, and then wonder if i’m not better off safe at home.

it’s hard to imagine going again. we have spent six+ years weaving ourselves financially and professionally and community-wise into this rooted life. the roots are good and growing strong. Dave spent the summer hacking out a patch of forest for a cabin for next year. we live a different kind of cacophony now.

i still don’t handle it very well sometimes. i don’t like the constant multiple demands on my attention. i don’t like mess. Dave looks at me funny when i shout about the fact that Oscar’s bus to kindergarten wants to pick him up SEVENTY MINUTES before the start of school even though we live an eight-minute drive away. what do you expect me to do? i counter, and then wonder if everyone wouldn’t be better off with me safe in Outer Mongolia.

sometimes far, far away sounds magical.

but wherever you go, there you are. ;)

the truth is, this is simply not that time in my life. i hope it comes again, and i will hold the space for it in my sense of myself. i even have vague hopes of vagabonding with the kids in five or six years time…taking a year or two as a family and committing to a joint work experience somewhere very different from this little corner of the world. but for now, i am mostly content to keep watering and weeding these roots here in The Shire my pastoral homeland.

(i’d happily eat catfood for a weekend in Paris, though. just sayin’.)

what about you? where would YOU go, if you could pick up and go anywhere? what would be different about there?
***

…a few excerpts from my responses to the author interviews for BWTW2011. there are some exceptional writers in this collection: i’m looking forward to seeing the composite of answers that emerge. will share.

What’s one place that has moved you or changed you in a significant way?

The Canadian Arctic. It was the first place in which I ever felt truly Other, and in which I came face to face with the legacies of colonialism and cultural history that permeate travel. I stayed a long time, and it taught me a lot about humility and relativism and my own privilege, and the folly of ever believing you fully understand what it is to be in another’s skin. The expanse of space there, the vulnerability of realizing that if you were to walk out into it you could go a thousand miles before ever meeting another human, is breathtaking. The North taught me that we are all different, and all inter-reliant, at the same time.

In what ways does writing inform your relationship with travel? Do you keep a journal? Conduct interviews? Write on location?

Over the last few years, especially since I began blogging, my journal-writing has dwindled. I still have a big, black-bound artist’s sketchbook: the writing inside is still all-caps print, the aesthetic signature I developed for myself back in the days when I still considered my handwriting a part of my identity. But the current sketchbook – number thirteen or so in a long lineage – only sees the light of day these days when I travel. Especially alone. I love to travel alone, to play flaneur in an unfamiliar city. But writing is what keeps traveling alone from being lonely, for me. My journal is my companion when I’m stuck in an airport, or want to take up a table by myself in a pub without looking like I’ve been stood up. Writing is conversational: it allows me to dig in and reflect on what I’ve been seeing and how that changes what I’ve seen before. But these days I need to work harder to create that mental space, because the world and conversation and feedback are so easily at all of our fingertips…

You do have a way of expressing things that takes me right along with you every step.

If I could go anywhere, it would be to Europe. That’s about as specific as I can get without further boundaries placed upon my travel. I originally wanted to go to Europe, but ended up in Australia instead. Not that I’m complaining, as that’s worked out rather well for me, but the hankering for Europe has never subsided, and has never had an opportunity to be satiated as every major holiday now is a trip home to Canada to see family. One day…

Wanderlust. Yeah.
I’ve never been free. In 2000 when you were on another continent, I was graduating university with a three year old boy cheering me on.
I have no experience with travel. But I want it. To be annonymous. It could be anywhere. I would take Martin. We would pretend to be 20 again and new lovers.
Sigh. I just hope we get the chance before we’re too old.

But not too much. Now I’m excited because I’m going to Hawaii in February. That seems like my speed these days.

Our plan has always been a big African safari type trip for our 25 anniversary. So, in 16 years, that’s the plan. Prior to that? Travel is going to be largely kid-friendly destinations. That are warm. Where I can still practice yoga. So Hawaii?

Love this post, Bon. And congrats on the publication. I’m putting it on my list of things to read.

I would love to spend some time in Iceland – hot springs and Brennivin and akvavit and music I’ve never heard before, and that clear northern light – I’d go tomorrow if I had discretionary funds, a valid passport and didn’t have to worry about looking after an active toddler who may be entering a biting phase (fingers crossed that she’s NOT).

The LOTR books ended with a possibility that some day Sam might not rest easily in the Shire (he’d been a traveler and a ring-bearer, too). And you have to wonder if he didn’t sometimes wish for bright stars over strange skies when his cute hobbit babies wouldn’t go to sleep and his cute hobbit wife had dark circles under her eyes and asked him why, for goodness’ sake, he couldn’t be more quiet when washing up the dishes.

I have big plans for my empty nest days (or maybe just the days when I don’t need a pack ‘n play). I’m 31 and I have two babies so my traveling bug never really got the chance. But I will wander someday…

The Great Barrier Reef. Take my mask and snorkel, rent tanks when I get there.

I am, of course, an empty nester. Mostly. Sometimes dogs and grandkids inhabit the nest for a while. In between, husband and I take long, wandering driving vacations. We are in love with the American South West states. Never know where we will be from one day to the next. More like Toad than Bilbo.

But my best travel? A daugher will phone – I want a week off, where will we go. Or – we’re going to Barcelona (or Vancouver Island), could you come along as a nanny for the kids? I keep my passport up to date! Travel with a compatible adult offspring is one of life’s greatest treasures.

I was young when I had my children and now in my mid-forty’s, I’m enjoying being an empty-nester. My husband & I marked the transition by buying a sailboat & learning to sail. We dream of one day sailing away to foreign ports.

Beautifully put. I identify with much of this post. First though, my partner and I were JUST talking about Frodo’s inability to engage back to his community after his journey and experiences…and how all of this relates to losing a baby. Anyway, yes, ripe with metaphor.

We, too, used to travel. We packed up at 23 and lived in Sydney for a few years and then LA for a year and then traveled around the world for almost a year and returned back to the land of kids and jobs and furniture at 28. Then we had a kid and our wanderlust was pushed into a closet, though we still manage to talk the grandparents into babysitting for a week so we can hit the road.

I’m not sure where I’d go now. Probably back to Nepal, where the days are easy and the mountains fierce. Or maybe to the Canadian arctic. That sounds pretty wonderful.

I almost forgot. This kind of stuff gives me some hope for family travel sometime in the near future (though we leave soon for Eastern Europe for 3 weeks with my two year old) – but this kind of travel is what I want to be doing:

I both love to travel and hate it, love to stay home and hate it. There’s something wonderful about both.

Also, I love you for this: some wiser people used that period in their lives to, um, start careers. i plan to go live with them when i am old. i will tell stories from my lost years of indigence in return for small plates of catfood.

I also have the wanderlust, but ATM am living in The Shire. Do plan to resume traveling, when Six is just a bit older. Definitely before he’s 18. Last year, my SIL took her two boys, then 9 and 11, to an ashram in India for a month. And they just got back from six weeks in Europe. My point is, it can be done. Congrats on pub!

I, too, had wanderlust that I didn’t indulge in (much) until my 30s. I thought I was settled then, but instead I took my 3 y/o twins and 5 y/o boy and my husband and I moved to Mauritania. We lived there nearly 6 years, plus a year in France, and then 2 years in Morocco. Now we’ve been back in the US for a year, and yet we are still very much defined by our years overseas. We all miss it a lot. I feel for the kids’ sake we need to stay where we are for a while, at least till the twins finish high school. Too much moving isn’t good. But after that? I suspect my husband and I will move again.
I think living internationally is a wonderful gift to give your children.
I really miss Morocco.
And congrats on your inclusion in the book! :) I will have to read that one. I love travel writing!